Why do WP Updates Have to Mess up Older Posts?

  • I have been blogging since 2005.

    WP updates have unlinked images on older postings, due to a newer format.

    Worse, foreign language characters and accented characters turn into mixed characters groups. More recently, even more annoyingly, all older postings now have apostrophes and dashes also turned into gobbledey gook.

    I have occasion to quote older postings with some regularity. Hand editing the majority of 18,000 posts is not practical.

    Is there a global fix?

    Character problems and dead image link example:

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    That sounds like a character encoding issue.

    Over the years, in order to remain compatible with databases (meaning MySQL, MSSQL, MariaDB, etc), and to allow for more characters like emoji and other non-Roman letters, WordPress had to reconfigure the database tables. This was back in 2015 or so, which is why you see it on older posts.

    One of the quirks is what you’re seeing with a€ and so on ??

    The good news is there are ways around it, but it may cause other similar issues.

    Look at your wp-config.php for a DB_CHARSET define. That value needs to match the value on each table in your database.

    Today it should look like this: define(DB_CHARSET, utf8mb4); or define(DB_CHARSET, utf8);

    If one doesn’t work, try the other. If neither work, you’ll have to look at your site’s Database. You have have Latin1 or some other charset defined. If you see you have multiple charsets depending on the table, you’ll have to update each table to match each other. Some hosts can assist with that.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • The topic ‘Why do WP Updates Have to Mess up Older Posts?’ is closed to new replies.